contemplating the labyrinth

Enigmatic Variations - Re-imagining Theseus – the threads that bind us

Re-imagining Theseus is a sequence of  black and white photographs in which my husband Peter and I imagine the legend of Theseus from a queer perspective.

The ‘thread of Ariadne’ becomes a meditation on the ‘threads that bind us together’.

The figures prepare to enter the labyrinth with a contemporary reworking of the Greek mask. To be disguised as oneself is a useful metaphor for the closeting of a homosexual identity.

When I first came out as a young man I relocated to a nearby city where the only gay club was situated in an elongated subterranean corridor euphemistically called “the tunnel”. The metaphor in the 1980s of still needing to be ‘underground’ was not lost on an older generation of people like my husband Peter who remembered a pre Wolfenden Britain where same sex attraction was ‘a love that dare not speak its name’.

In order to find partners in times of prohibition, homosexuals would regularly enter the labyrinth in the guise of bars, clubs and bath houses. 

The series portrays successive stages from the couple’s initiation into the mystery of the labyrinth - ‘a queer marriage’, ‘unmasking the hidden truth about our nature’, ‘facing our mutual minotaur’, ‘upholding the threads that bind us’ and ‘all that remains’. 

An edit of the works were shown in my exhibition at Ffotogallery Wales in 2022